The incredible self-healing cell phone

I had heard cell phone horror stories before, and swore that I was far too responsible to break my cell phone. I didn't need to write down all my phone numbers! I would never lose my cell phone!

All that came back to haunt me on Saturday night. In the midst of my brief trip up to Vermont, I got wasted at a party and dropped my cell phone.

I have to come clean... or come dirty, as the case may be. I told everyone that I dropped my phone into a puddle of water. That water happened to be in a toilet. I was THAT GUY who tried to talk on the phone while standing at the ready. Luckily, I dropped my phone before I could get down to business, so when it fell in the toilet, I instinctively jumped for my phone, sticking my hand right down into that nasty water. Would I have done the same thing sober? Probably.

The phone seemed pretty much done for. The light on the flash of the camera was lit. The phone was vibrating constantly (was I getting a call? I don't know. I pressed "send" and nothing happened). It would not STOP vibrating, and I couldn't turn it off. I even smashed it against the sidewalk to make it stop. That seemed to do the trick.

I panicked. I had no phone. Nobody could call me. My lifeline was gone. Sunday morning came, and my phone was still useless. I posted to Myspace asking my friends to send their phone numbers to me. I put up an away message on AIM.

Then, this morning, when I had resigned myself to the fact that I would have to blow $200 on a new cell phone without a new contract, I plugged it in, and everything was back to normal. The phone numbers were there. The drunk photos from the party were there. The text messages and voice mails from people wondering where I disappeared to were there.

It's a damn shame in a way. I've been looking for an excuse to get a new phone. But for that brief 36 hour period, I felt disconnected from the world. And I will now keep a list of phone numbers saved on my computer. And I might print it out, too, in case I ever drop my laptop into the toilet.

Oh, and to prove to you that any logic I had went out the window on Saturday night, here is a "before and after" sequence of me doing a shot of pure melted butter: